This Sunday, we were thrilled to kick-off our inaugural year of Omanut!

Omanut (art) is a new visual arts based approach to Jewish learning for Grades 4-5. The program is designed to provide students with innovative, thoughtful, challenging and creative learning experiences in order to explore the intersection of their own creativity, Jewish learning, and the arts. We hope that students will build community, friendship, pride, and both arts and analytic skills through collaborative, hands-on projects. Students will use art as a way to explore Jewish text, and then text as a way to deepen the experience of creating art. Throughout the year, families will also be engaged in parallel learning opportunities, student exhibits, family art-making experiences, etc. We are extremely grateful to Combined Jewish Philanthropies and our CJP consultant, Tova Speter, for their support in the creation of our Omanut Program.

During our first session of Omanut, parents and kids began together as one community with a little bit of nosh, shmooze, and welcome. The families were introduced to our two spectacular faculty members, Behzad Dayanim and Ben Cohan. Then, students moved with their teachers to their studio/learning space, where they dove right into a text study of the prayer Yotzer Or and then created collages inspired by the text.

While students were in their studio/learning spaces, parents had the opportunity to learn more about the program and to also study the text of Yotzer Or with Alison Kur, Executive Director of Jewish Living at TBE. Then, parents met with our CJP consultant Tova Speter to participate in a parallel collage making experience. At the end of the program, parents and students reunited. It was wonderful to see parents sharing their collages with their kids, and kids sharing their collages with their parents. The energy and excitement in the room was palpable, and we are excited to see all the wonderful things that will come this year out of our Omanut program! For more information about Omanut, please click here!

Yesterday at TBE we kicked off an amazing year together in BM3T with song, friends and learning! What are we so excited about for this year?

Our 6th graders will have the opportunity to explore Jewish lifecycle events, including birth, B’nei Mitzvah and Wedding in their Jewish Journeys class. Through these life cycle events, they will explore the Jewish values embedded within-- exploring topics like friendship, family, and more. Our Kesher program is a great way for our 7th graders to connect with one another in a safe space, with their peers of the same gender and to share and explore their values as Jewish teenagers in our community and in the greater Jewish community. Yesterday we heard from a Kesher alumna who had an incredible experience and we can’t wait for our 7th graders to know what she’s talking about!Being a part of the 6th grade text class in BM3T is an important foundation for students’ critical thinking and understanding both of Jewish texts and of any texts they encounter throughout their life. In engaging students in meaningful discussions of these texts as they relate to their lives, this class is a great space in which students can explore and bring new meaning to Jewish text and their values. Yesterday, Morah Miriam gave our BM3T families a demonstration of what we do every week in our text class and we’re excited for a great year of learning!

This year JELY is going to be epic. In our JELY events we’re going to hang out with our friends, go to really cool places in the Boston area and have tons of fun building community and relationships with peers and staff! Yesterday I had a great brainstorm with our 6th grade families and heard about what our 6th graders are interested in and the kinds of experiences they want to have this year. It’s going to be a great year in JELY and we can’t wait to get started with our first event on October 26th!

The BM3T Shabbaton coming up in less than a month (October 17-18) and we couldn’t be more excited for a fun weekend of community building, prayer, learning and having a great time with our BM3T friends. We have an amazing staff and we’re looking forward to spending a meaningful Shabbat at the scenic Prindle Pond Conference Center in Charlton, MA. Registration is open, visit http://www.tbeyouth.org/bm3t-shabbaton.html today!

Even as we’re gearing up for a fun year in BM3T, we can’t help but look forward in our Jewish Journeys to Life after BM3T! Havayah, the teen community (grades 8-12) at TBE, is so excited to welcome our 7th graders at the end of this year. Yesterday, our Havayah teen leaders talked with our 7th graders about their experiences with Havayah as being a safe, meaningful, fun and educational place to explore their Jewish identities and to connect with their friends. Don’t worry BM3T, your time is Havayah is quickly approaching!Wishing all of our families a Shana Tova, and we can’t wait to get started with a great year in BM3T after the holidays! For more information about BM3T, click here.

by Rabbi Josh Franklin

Our Beit Midrash learning program kicked off this passed Sunday with an experience for the entire family. Beit Midrash (House of Learning) is a unique and exciting approach to Jewish learning for Grades 3-5 at TBE. The program involves students in rich, meaningful and experiential Jewish learning through engagement with age-appropriate works of Jewish fiction, the study of our sacred texts, and innovative Hebrew learning in a small-group setting. Not only did we get a chance to meet new families and reconnect with familiar faces, but we launched our curricular theme for the year: “Who is a Hero?” We will explore this question through our family programs, as well as within our monthly chavurot (our book discussions and learning sessions).

We began by showing students and parents clips of real life acts of heroism caught on camera. In the videos, they watched many different kinds of heroism from a man leaping onto subway tracks to save a woman who fell, to a boy taking control of a bus after the driver loses consciousness, to a man simply picking up a disabled woman who fell in the middle of a street. Any person can become a hero, and heroes come in all shapes and sizes. When we polled our families to find out what qualities they believe heroes possess, they came up with the following responses.

Our session also focused on one of the unsung heroes in the Jewish tradition. During each family session, we will explore a new personality. This week we talked about Nachshon Ben Amminadab. The Torah mentions Nachshon several times, but his real standout appearance can be found in the Midrash. Our students read the book Nachshon, Who Was Afraid to Swim, while our parents studied a Midrash about Nachshon from Mekhilta D’Rabbi Ishmael. We discussed how Nachshon embodies the rabbinic value of being a stand up guy: ובִמְקוֹם שֶׁאֵין אֲנָשִׁים, הִשְׁתַּדֵּל לִהְיוֹת אִישׁ In a place where no one stand up for others, strive to be the one of stands up for others (Pirke Avot 2:5)While Moses is busy praying at the Sea of Reeds, the Israelites are kvetching, and the Egyptian army is pursing. Nachshon rises to the occasion and takes a leap of faith into the water. He becomes a hero by standing up and taking action when no one else will. We left our families with the following questions to reflect on at the end of the session, and to take home for dinner table conversations. - When have you acted like Nachshon?- Was there a time when you should have acted like Nahshon, but didn’t?- Who is someone you know who has acted like Nachshon?- Is there ever a time when it’s not good to act like Nachshon?- How are you going to begin to act like Nachshon?

Last year, I spent six weeks obsessively watching Gossip Girl, a TV show about upscale life in the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It was amazing. Prior to my discovery of this magical world, the show had ended its six-season run in 2012. Now, I am re-watching it. Why, you must be asking, would I willingly spend my time watching a fictional TV show about a bunch of trust fund brats and their many (often illegal) escapades around New York? I have nothing in common with these characters, besides the fact that they and I are teenagers. Their world is fantastical to me. As they float through high school and college, they spend their evenings drinking signature cocktails, and their spare time doing absolutely everything except homework. The show was designed around the concept of displaying the newest pop culture and fashions, so their wardrobes are complete with a new ensemble for every occasion. In my wildest dreams, I could never be a part of their world, even if I knew where to find the entrance. And yet, I cannot tear myself away from their stories, even though I know exactly how it will end. Dan Humphrey, one of the characters, is Lonely Boy, an outsider who worms his way into the inner circle of Blair Waldorf, Nate Archibald, and Chuck Bass, through his new girlfriend, Serena Van Der Woodsen. I should identify with him, always the observer to their extravagant lifestyle, allowed in but never accepted as one of their own. I don’t. In fact, I kind of really don’t like Dan. He is mopey and so focused on his “less-than” social standing that he neglects to recognize his own positive qualities. Instead, I feel a kinship with Blair Waldorf, crown princess of the Upper East Side. She holds an incredibly vast amount of power, has impeccable taste in clothes, and the volition and ability to follow her dreams, wherever they might lead. Despite all of that, she has her fair share of problems. Not to give away any major plotlines, but like the rest of us normal people, Blair has an up and down relationship with her mother. She has a best friend on whom she relies heavily. The two of them gossip about boys, but they also stay up late into the night talking about the future, their aspirations for success, and how much they care about each other. (They totally pass the Bechdel test, by the way!) While they do get on each other’s nerves from time to time, Blair and Serena always come first in each other’s lives, and each woman will do anything for her best friend. So, I guess I am rewatching Gossip Girl because it’s like an alternate universe where everything is exactly the same. The characters may be driven around in limos and jet across the world on a whim, but best friends are best friends, on the Upper East Side or right here in Newton, Massachusetts.